Member request: please report any suspected AI Posts.

justins7 said:
Wow, thanks for the context and tips on spotting these. It's all really disturbing, as we keep getting closer to a Blade Runneresque world.

What is the point of these AI bot posts anyway? Are they redirecting you to an external link?
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I can't speculate on AI generated forum posts specifically, but I can say that, in general, the reason why AI is showing up everywhere in everything is because some Silicon Valley made a big bet on this technology and have been trying to hype it up as much as possible to maintain their investment. The more they hype it up, the more it gets adopted by other company executives who don't think critically and don't know any better as a way to reduce labor costs. The AI industry is not profitable. It's a speculative bubble and the goal has been to saturate the world with it until it becomes too big to fail in the eyes of governments. Ever the good libertarians, they all want government money to prop up their unprofitable investments, whether it be through military and intelligence agency contracts or through direct bailouts.

AI is garbage and it shouldn't have a place on forums. We're one of the last vestiges of the internet as it used to exist, before search engines and social media companies and now AI concentrated and centralized web traffic onto a small handful of platforms. We should keep our little space clean so that we can have productive discussions about our old, often analogue hobby.
 
trix4ever said:
I know I'm an old fart, but I still don't understand how anyone benefits by doing this.
I also wish genuine members of the forum posting ai responses could be stopped, it annoys the crap out of me
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User-driven forums are sometimes used as a testing ground for LLM's. Forum member interaction can show the users whether the posts are well received or not, and learn to adjust themselves.

AI accounts in forums are used to push products via links. Such links can also lead to malware.

In the old(er) days, rogue SEO companies would bombard blogs with gibberish comments that contain keywords along with links back to a website they were attempting to boost in search rankings. The links were not necessarily meant to be clicked, they were used as 'backlinks' to help give the target site relevance.

On reddit, it is unfortunately popular to use ChatGPT or similar to write fake posts and hopefully farm for karma. Accounts with high karma can be later sold, much like social media accounts with large numbers of followers.
 
Social media accounts with high amounts of followers and Reddit accounts with high karma can be sold to bot farms and then used to manipulate public opinion in order to get backing for things like elections and referendums; look at the Cambridge Analytica scandal during the Brexit vote or the pro-Trump actions of the "Internet Research Agency" in Russia, for instance.

Here, I'd imagine the main benefit would be to appear like a real member of the community in order to scam people through the classifieds; this'd be a much smaller operation, probably run by individuals, but even these can be run out of "scam factories"; a podcast called Criminal put together a very good episode on how these things are operated.

Either way, tools like ChatGPT et al. make life much easier for the people involved. And that's basically the only way these tools are being used that is productive.

@Evergreen States is right: companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are losing money hand-over-fist, but they're engaging in circular accounting to hide it and keep pushing the numbers up while they keep telling people these tools are "inevitable", desperately hoping that they somehow become profitable (or "too big to fail") before the bubble pops. It's insane.
 
RFF is very small potatoes, bots that use AI for posts are not going for classified scams, you're right, that's an individual thing (we've had a few attempts in the last year.) Bots infiltrating smaller sites which when multiplied by thousands of sites could ultimately result in lot of clicks/traffic for the scammers.

This is no different than what has been happening for 20+ years except for the AI part...posts will on the surface look legit, as opposed to completely off topic.
 
Coldkennels said:
It's the very last post in that thread at the time of writing:

View attachment 4884642
Brand new account with only one post and all of the hallmarks of "AI"-generated text in the post; not only is it regurgitating old info without offering anything new, but it uses certain key words and grammatical structures that become easy to spot once you've seen them a few times.

I love this place because it's a relative sanctuary from the low-effort attention-seeking posting behaviour and the flood of GenAI slop elsewhere on the internet. If this stuff starts clogging up here as well, it'll be a sad day.
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".............................but it uses certain key words and grammatical structures that become easy to spot once you've seen them a few times."
I particularly agree with this observation. As soon as I read the post my feeling (my "spidey sense") was that it "smelled" like an AI generated post - the tone, the structure, the content and the terminology used all pointed to this IMHO.

I have also noticed similar signs of AI appearing on Youtube recently.

I am a bit of a history buff and like to read about WW1 and WW2. Recently, multiple (similarly named) contributor channels have been turning up. All have similar symptoms - a certain folksy way of writing about major events or battles, all told from the supposed perspective of someone who was involved in those events and all following the identical or near identical structure and containing similar (made up?) events that supposedly occurred to the hero or heroine. Also the video images used in these stories, very often have nothing to do at all with either the theatre of war supposedly involved or in many cases even with that war itself ( For example, I have seen stories about WW2 in which video images from films of WW1 or Vietnam are dropped into the storyline to illustrate the narration. If nothing else this at least makes it blindingly obvious that it's all a load of horse-pucky. These stories pretty well all have the feel of a high school freshman trying to write a story for a school play. Very unsophisticated in tone and manner, very repetitive and frankly very robotic.

Worst of all, perhaps, if I block a specific channel, very shortly thereafter the same or very similar stories turn up on another, similarly named channel. This sh$t is happening everywhere.
 
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I had not given AI consideration as the cause of lousy YT vids with inappropriate images. I wrote it off to lazy video generators. Another annoyance, along with inappropriate images, is the awful text-to-voice tracks which mispronounce words. An honest digital creator would be doing their own voice-overs. But what is really disappointing is that most folks do not notice.
 
That's the worst bit. Pointing out how bad, unreliable, untrue, problematic, abusable, etc. the output from these "AI" tools is all-too-often results in nothing but a shrug.

Hell, even if people don't care about the cultural, intellectual, sociological, or economic harm being wrought by this bubble, you'd think they would care about the ludicrous amount of energy and water the data centres are consuming, and the obvious environmental damage that's causing.

But again... shrug. "I like my silly little chatbot."
 
boojum said:
I had not given AI consideration as the cause of lousy YT vids with inappropriate images. I wrote it off to lazy video generators. Another annoyance, along with inappropriate images, is the awful text-to-voice tracks which mispronounce words. An honest digital creator would be doing their own voice-overs. But what is really disappointing is that most folks do not notice.
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Initially I had also put it down to lazy and greedy content generators just as you did. But if this is due to greed by content creators what better way to relentlessly churn out rubbish for reward than by using AI. I was forced to the realization that due to there being so many such videos (all of them in the last few months as AI tools came to the fore) that the only feasible way of generating the volume of dross was AI. Like you I had also noticed the execrable and ludicrous pronunciation and realized that this also fit in with my belief that this is likewise due to AI (which after all is still immature). Some pronunciation was so laughable (and so frequent) that even the dumbest copy reader would surely not make so many errors - these errors mostly having also been a recent phenomenon. So, this was the only way I could feasibly explain it.)
 
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Not sure if the Admin are taking measures or anyone else who runs a website and has root access for the server to reduce this but 2 excellent articles addressing the issue for sites:

Ultimate Block List to Stop AI Bots

How to Stop Google from AI-Summarising Your Website (and Reclaim Your Organic Traffic)

Cloudfare also now has preventative measures if you use them as a CDN and works with the free version, ironically they use AI to block AI, funny.

Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth
 
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Coldkennels said:
@Evergreen States is right: companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are losing money hand-over-fist, but they're engaging in circular accounting to hide it and keep pushing the numbers up while they keep telling people these tools are "inevitable", desperately hoping that they somehow become profitable (or "too big to fail") before the bubble pops. It's insane.
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This video describes how this crazy circular economy is working.



Not to mention how much electricity that AI is predicted to consume, and how much water it will use, even more than bitcoin mining.

 
Coldkennels said:
It's the very last post in that thread at the time of writing:

View attachment 4884642
Brand new account with only one post and all of the hallmarks of "AI"-generated text in the post; not only is it regurgitating old info without offering anything new, but it uses certain key words and grammatical structures that become easy to spot once you've seen them a few times.

I love this place because it's a relative sanctuary from the low-effort attention-seeking posting behaviour and the flood of GenAI slop elsewhere on the internet. If this stuff starts clogging up here as well, it'll be a sad day.
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The incredible literacy and originality of writing here provides a protective effect and so does the subtlety of ideas - or no idea as such - behind most of the photography here.
 
peterm1 said:
but it uses certain key words and grammatical structures that become easy to spot once you've seen them a few times."
I particularly agree with this observation. As soon as I read the post my feeling (my "spidey sense") was that it "smelled" like an AI generated post - the tone, the structure, the content and the terminology used all pointed to this IMHO.
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I think the problem I'm finding in myself is that I try to steer clear of AI so vehemently that I have a hard time learning its "tells." I'm not exposing myself to LLM content much, at all, so it may be a while before I learn the telltale signs.
 
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